I Will Not Leave You Comfortless

Book excerpt: This memoir of “a happy childhood in rural Missouri just before the digital revolution [is] a sweet record of a time and a place that was not Always On.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch Spanning one year of the author’s life—1984—I Will Not Leave You Comfortless is the intimate memoir of a young boy coming to consciousness in small-town Missouri. The year will bring ten-year-old Jeremy first loves, first losses, and a break from the innocence of boyhood that will never be fully repaired. For Jeremy, the seeming security of his life on the family farm is forever shaken by the life-altering events of that pivotal year. Throughout, he recalls the deeply sensual wonders of his rural Midwestern childhood—bicycle rides in September sunlight; the horizon vanishing behind tall grasses—while stories both heart-wrenching and humorous, tragic and triumphant, Jackson weaves past, present, and future into the rich Missouri landscape. “I could smell the mulberries crushed underfoot and the sweet steam of the cinnamon roll Grandma heated in the toaster oven just for Jeremy, hear the ever-increasing volume of an approaching late-spring storm . . . The year of Jeremy Jackson’s life on which he meditates in I Will Not Leave You Comfortless marked his transition from the perfect happiness of childhood to the much more complex reality of adulthood. It records, as well, the abiding comfort that remains—family, home and love.” —Wichita Eagle “Jackson writes about Missouri as the young Hemingway wrote about Michigan: with a clear eye; with hard-edged nostalgia; and (here’s the thing) with brilliance.” —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life